Trade: Gun control, global warming

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, however, has stressed the administration’s commitment to high standards in the transatlantic deal.

“First, let me be clear: There is nothing we seek to do through T-TIP to undermine the determinations that each of our systems has made with regard to the appropriate level of health, safety and environmental protection of our people,” Froman said on his first official trip to Brussels last fall. “When we talk about regulation and standards, we are talking about how to bridge the divergences between two well-regulated markets, not about launching a broad deregulatory agenda.”

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The White House does appear to be standing firm, if standing alone, on environmental protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, which the administration hopes to wrap up this year.

In addition to seeking lower tariffs, the negotiations aim to smooth out regulatory differences that hinder trade among the 12 Pacific Rim countries — meaning reducing duplicate procedures, not lowering protections, U.S. officials insist. That’s harder than it looks in a largely developing region, where environmental concerns take a back seat to economic growth.

The administration is seeking to enforce high environmental standards with sanctions, as it did in the recent South Korea, Colombia and Panama deals, documents released by WikiLeaks earlier this month show.

The 11 other nations, however, support a weaker “mutually satisfactory action plan” to resolve environmental violations without sanctions, according to a November report by the chief negotiators of the environmental chapter.

Environmental groups say those relatively toothless provisions would spell disaster for every key area of their agenda, including preventing illegal logging and wildlife trafficking.

“If the environment chapter is finalized as written in this leaked document, President Obama’s environmental trade record would be worse than George W. Bush’s,” said Michael Brune, Sierra Club president, after the text was revealed. “This draft chapter falls flat on every single one of our issues — oceans, fish, wildlife and forest protections — and in fact, rolls back on the progress in past free trade pacts.”

A USTR spokeswoman told POLITICO that the administration remained committed to the tougher standards but did not deny that the negotiations have been rough going.

“We are aggressively pursuing a robust, enforceable environmental standard in the TPP, including U.S. proposals that go above and beyond previous free trade agreements,” she said. “It is an uphill battle, but we’re pushing hard. We have worked closely with the environmental community from the start and have made our commitment clear.”

The most explicitly green U.S. trade talks would lower tariffs on the nearly $1 trillion trade in environmental technology goods, such as solar panels, wind turbines and catalytic converters.

The group of nations involved in the talks account for 86 percent of that trade, but tariffs on the goods can be as high as 35 percent.

Officials expressed hope on Friday that the talks, which are modeled on a smaller effort among Asia-Pacific Cooperation countries, eventually could expand to all 160 members of the World Trade Organization, which completed its first successful global trade deal in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

Jake Colvin, the National Foreign Trade Council’s vice president for global trade issues, said the launch of the talks “is not only a significant step toward addressing climate change, but is also important for building on the momentum generated by the recent Bali agreement to advance future trade negotiations under the umbrella of the WTO.”

But Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club’s responsible trade program, cautioned that some products under consideration, such as incinerators, steam generators and centrifuges, are used with outdated fossil-fuel technology.

“Trade can help spread environmentally friendly technologies,” she said, “but if the products we’re trading harm the environment, everyone loses.”